Twitter Has Removed More Than 1,500 Accounts As It Combats ‘Surge In Hateful Content’

Bloomberg reports that Twitter has had to limit its content moderation team drastically during the Musk takeover. According to anonymous inside sources cited by the publication, Twitter took away some employee access, limiting the ways in which those employees can enforce the current Twitter rules. This includes taking away access to internal tools for content moderation, and as a result, a lot of the people who work on the content moderation team cannot punish those who break the rules. These cases of misconduct include instances of hate speech, misinformation, and offensive content.

Due to the limitations enforced during this time, the moderation team is apparently only able to focus on high-impact rule violations. Such posts get bumped to manual enforcement and are dealt with, but the rest of it is in a bit of a limbo, it seems. Bloomberg claims that this restriction comes as part of Twitter’s source code freeze to ensure that employees (some of whom may be getting laid off) will not make any changes to the app while the company transitions to working with Musk at the helm. This kind of special access is usually open to hundreds of Twitter employees, but now, it’s been cut down to 15.

Twitter’s Head of Safety and Integrity, Yoel Roth, seems unbothered by the situation. Roth claims that Twitter is doing exactly what it should be “in the midst of a corporate transition to reduce opportunities for insider risk.” Roth also reports that the team has been “focused on addressing the surge in hateful conduct on Twitter.” As a result, more than 1,500 accounts have been removed. Whether this will be enough still remains to be seen.